Remembrance of Things Past
Remembrance of Things Past
June 23, 2004
By Condrado de Quiros
A FEW weeks ago, one youth asked me in a talk I gave: Where do we start? How do we begin to untie our tangle of problems? How do we go forward?
I said without hesitation that we go forward by going backward. We march ahead by retracing our steps.
The one thing we lack, which cannot be made up for by other things, is pride. It is the one thing other Asian countries have which has allowed them to forge ahead. It is the one thing that makes them come together when the chips are down, such as yield their dollars or not buy them when the local currency is floundering. It is the one thing we do not have, which has caused us to stagnate. It is the one thing that makes us think of ourselves first when the chips are down, clinging to our dollars or going on a dollar-buying spree when the peso is floundering.
Pride comes from a sense of having one's own. "God bless the child that's got his own," Billie Holiday sings in her famous song. She knew whereof she spoke: It came from the traumatic experience of being an African-American in America. God, or government, whichever came first, cursed the man that didn't get his own, and the black community took centuries to get its own, not least by losing some of its own, like Martin Luther King. It did so by finding its past. Alex Haley merely did his community the favor of putting into one word a process that had been taking place in their consciousness for some time: roots.
That is what we have to do: find our roots.
I say so from experience. I've written about this in the past, but I do not mind repeating it again and again. It was my brush with Philippine history, coming only during my college years, that changed my outlook forever. Before that, I knew more about George Washington and the cherry tree than about Jose Rizal and his slippers, courtesy of textbooks like "This Is Our Land, This is Our Home," which we read in elementary school. The "this" did not refer to the Philippines, it referred to America. The school was aptly called a parochial school. From hindsight, it wasn't just the fact that it was the parish school that made it so.
It was only in college that I encountered our own history, something that doesn't happen to other Asian nationals, who cannot escape their history even if they wanted to. That alone should show what is monumentally anomalous in this country. More ironically, my encounter with our own history did not come from school, it came from outside of it. It wasn't from the history courses I took, though I recall there was Rizal and a couple of other subjects in the early years, it was from the books I read at the time. And I read them only because of the influence of activism, which was raging in the campus then. It was a powerful influence, not least because it made history more than a matter of names and dates, which was how it was pretty much taught in school (it still is, if the complaints I hear these days, are true). It made it a matter of life and death.
I don't know what can take the place of activism to drive the youth today to these lengths. In past columns, I described the effect of that encounter as of someone who had been blind from birth and could see for the first time. When I wrote that, I hadn't yet read Oliver Sacks who showed in "An Anthropologist on Mars" that people who do see for the first time do not really see. They go through the process of learning to "see" with their eyes and not with their fingers. The correction is not a bad one. The sensation of first encountering the past -- our past -- remains overwhelming. But it truly takes time to take it in.
And it truly is the one thing that makes you proud to be Filipino. You do not have to invent a great civilization or great victories, you only have to know what happened. There is greatness enough there -- no, in abundance. And yes, there is triumph enough there, amid the defeats. The triumph of the spirit is always greater than the triumph of the sword. One is tempted to add that it is so because it lives forever, but there's the rub: in this country, it doesn't.
God bless the child that's got his own. That may seem like a strange thing to say in an era of globalization, which demands assimilation and integration and cooperation. But it is no contradiction at all, nor is it an anachronism. There is a difference between assimilating and being subsumed, between adapting and aping, between cooperating and surrendering.
To this day, I cannot forget a story told to me by a Filipino ad man in San Francisco. During a conference, he was astounded to see that American ad-makers produced entirely different ads for Mexican, Vietnamese, Italians and other minority groups in America, but not so for Filipinos, though Filipinos were the second biggest ethnic community in California, after the Mexicans. That was so, it turned out, because they considered the others to be separate markets and the Filipinos only to be a subset of the American one. Which is true: Filipinos are Americans even in their own country. That is not assimilation, that is subsumption; that is not adaptation, that is loss of identity; that is not cooperation, that is surrender.
No, nationalism is not an enemy of globalization, independence is not an enemy of interdependence, pride is not an enemy of getting along with others. It takes two to make a strong bond. That is true as much for nations as for spouses. It is two countries or peoples that are fiercely independent -- that have their pride and identities -- that create lasting unions. The rest is just mail-order marriages.
The way to that pride and independence and sense of country is for us to remember the past. That is not a luxury, that is a necessity. It does not just spell the difference between enlightenment and ignorance, it spells the difference between life and death.
June 23, 2004
By Condrado de Quiros
A FEW weeks ago, one youth asked me in a talk I gave: Where do we start? How do we begin to untie our tangle of problems? How do we go forward?
I said without hesitation that we go forward by going backward. We march ahead by retracing our steps.
The one thing we lack, which cannot be made up for by other things, is pride. It is the one thing other Asian countries have which has allowed them to forge ahead. It is the one thing that makes them come together when the chips are down, such as yield their dollars or not buy them when the local currency is floundering. It is the one thing we do not have, which has caused us to stagnate. It is the one thing that makes us think of ourselves first when the chips are down, clinging to our dollars or going on a dollar-buying spree when the peso is floundering.
Pride comes from a sense of having one's own. "God bless the child that's got his own," Billie Holiday sings in her famous song. She knew whereof she spoke: It came from the traumatic experience of being an African-American in America. God, or government, whichever came first, cursed the man that didn't get his own, and the black community took centuries to get its own, not least by losing some of its own, like Martin Luther King. It did so by finding its past. Alex Haley merely did his community the favor of putting into one word a process that had been taking place in their consciousness for some time: roots.
That is what we have to do: find our roots.
I say so from experience. I've written about this in the past, but I do not mind repeating it again and again. It was my brush with Philippine history, coming only during my college years, that changed my outlook forever. Before that, I knew more about George Washington and the cherry tree than about Jose Rizal and his slippers, courtesy of textbooks like "This Is Our Land, This is Our Home," which we read in elementary school. The "this" did not refer to the Philippines, it referred to America. The school was aptly called a parochial school. From hindsight, it wasn't just the fact that it was the parish school that made it so.
It was only in college that I encountered our own history, something that doesn't happen to other Asian nationals, who cannot escape their history even if they wanted to. That alone should show what is monumentally anomalous in this country. More ironically, my encounter with our own history did not come from school, it came from outside of it. It wasn't from the history courses I took, though I recall there was Rizal and a couple of other subjects in the early years, it was from the books I read at the time. And I read them only because of the influence of activism, which was raging in the campus then. It was a powerful influence, not least because it made history more than a matter of names and dates, which was how it was pretty much taught in school (it still is, if the complaints I hear these days, are true). It made it a matter of life and death.
I don't know what can take the place of activism to drive the youth today to these lengths. In past columns, I described the effect of that encounter as of someone who had been blind from birth and could see for the first time. When I wrote that, I hadn't yet read Oliver Sacks who showed in "An Anthropologist on Mars" that people who do see for the first time do not really see. They go through the process of learning to "see" with their eyes and not with their fingers. The correction is not a bad one. The sensation of first encountering the past -- our past -- remains overwhelming. But it truly takes time to take it in.
And it truly is the one thing that makes you proud to be Filipino. You do not have to invent a great civilization or great victories, you only have to know what happened. There is greatness enough there -- no, in abundance. And yes, there is triumph enough there, amid the defeats. The triumph of the spirit is always greater than the triumph of the sword. One is tempted to add that it is so because it lives forever, but there's the rub: in this country, it doesn't.
God bless the child that's got his own. That may seem like a strange thing to say in an era of globalization, which demands assimilation and integration and cooperation. But it is no contradiction at all, nor is it an anachronism. There is a difference between assimilating and being subsumed, between adapting and aping, between cooperating and surrendering.
To this day, I cannot forget a story told to me by a Filipino ad man in San Francisco. During a conference, he was astounded to see that American ad-makers produced entirely different ads for Mexican, Vietnamese, Italians and other minority groups in America, but not so for Filipinos, though Filipinos were the second biggest ethnic community in California, after the Mexicans. That was so, it turned out, because they considered the others to be separate markets and the Filipinos only to be a subset of the American one. Which is true: Filipinos are Americans even in their own country. That is not assimilation, that is subsumption; that is not adaptation, that is loss of identity; that is not cooperation, that is surrender.
No, nationalism is not an enemy of globalization, independence is not an enemy of interdependence, pride is not an enemy of getting along with others. It takes two to make a strong bond. That is true as much for nations as for spouses. It is two countries or peoples that are fiercely independent -- that have their pride and identities -- that create lasting unions. The rest is just mail-order marriages.
The way to that pride and independence and sense of country is for us to remember the past. That is not a luxury, that is a necessity. It does not just spell the difference between enlightenment and ignorance, it spells the difference between life and death.
posted by Dante at 12:01 AM
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